


But Still I Find

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Developing Relationship, Happy Ending, M/M, Past Relationship(s), and you dont rlly have to slog through a bunch of angst to get there, bisexual sam seaborn, but this time theres formalwear?, yet another fic of mine where the characters have a heart to heart in a parking lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22813786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: Sam looks at Josh and thinks about the years.-In which Sam didn't follow Josh to New Hampshire, Bartlet won anyway, and yet there's still something missing that they're determined to find.
Relationships: Josh Lyman/Sam Seaborn
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29





	But Still I Find

**Author's Note:**

> the title of this was originally from matchbox twenty's back 2 good ("wondering what it's like" from the line "well everyone here is wondering what it's like to be with somebody else") which had inspired a much angstier first draft of this fic tht i scrapped bc i had the notion this one should be happy. the title now is a misheard lyric from carly simon's the carter family, the third verse of which inspired something here i'm sure

Sam wasn’t even supposed to be there. Not in the grand scheme of things. Where he should’ve been was anyone’s guess, all the paths that could've been too tangled to make sense of just for one night, but it sure as hell wasn’t taping down a grimace and hoping it’d let him sail through.

The cut of a black car door gasping on moonlight, the wrinkles of a silk shawl dipping down the low back of her new dress, the funny set of his bowtie at the base of his throat. Here he was anyway, stepping in and stepping up one last time.

He had to keep telling himself that or he never would’ve gotten out of the car. One last ride and then he was gone from this life. He’d see all these people again, sure, there was no way around that. In their wallets and purses and checkbooks was the key to every city up and down the eastern seaboard and no matter which of the lives he could lead he chose, he’d always end up in places like these. Pressed suits and glossy dresses, passing around drinks and opinions on silver platters.

The next time, though, he hoped it’d be a little different than this. Maybe he’d be sleepless, maybe he’d be sorry, maybe he’d be happy—finally, really happy, like a Californian sunset and ice cream on your palms while the tide worked at the leg of your pants—but at least he’d be _something_. As it stood, he knew absence better than he did anything else.

No matter what, it would be different. For one, Lisa would get there far earlier than he did. That was somehow the beginning and end of them: she liked to be early, he never seemed to have any choice but to be late, and they loved each other, just not enough.

He thumbed at his tie, working under it to let air bypass the four-way stop lodged in his throat. Behind him someone was tuning a violin, ahead of him more people were arriving. He was always late, but he was never the least prepared or the last one in.

Sam had a plan for these events. In fact, he always had. As a kid he could get out of tagging along with his parents on the basis of age; as a teenager because he had other obligations. As a twenty-something they _became_ his obligations and his alone, so he learned quickly the best way to approach them. Mostly that meant learning how to excuse himself from a droning or otherwise excruciating conversation with streamlined efficiency.

It all came down to a single, fickle lynchpin. If he were a younger man he’d probably find some comparison between that and life, but as it stood he was neither young nor philosophical. Frankly, he was just exceedingly desperate.

That was another good one, actually. You were either young or you were desperate, and the line between started blurring somewhere around twenty-five.

But to the point, the most important piece of untangling from the agony of the one-sided one-on-one was simple. All he had to do was find someone he knew and to some degree was prepared to spend half the night with. Actually wanting to catch up wasn’t a prerequisite, but it helped if he could look at least mildly interested when they started talking about the new baby, or the new boat, or the new blonde they’d wed in a very tasteful destination wedding. That made people think twice before stealing him away for ‘just a minute, you don’t mind, do you?’

Sam was a great conversationalist, one of the best around. He had a firm handshake, a solid voice, a nice meter—he was the ideal person to chat with in between courses. Except for the minor detail of having an overly honest face that was usually exacerbated by champagne on an empty stomach and the reoccurring thought that he was wasting his life. Baby blues could only distract from so much, but then again he’d made a point of not letting people learn his tells anymore.

At current point, he was hopelessly stalled in conversation with a man by the name of Randall J. Pierce III, which was just…. That had to be a Bond villain, right? There was no way someone’s parents wrote that down with a straight face. Rich coming from a man with an alliterative name and the middle name Norman, sure, but that at least made him qualified for the job.

Despite Pierce’s best efforts to bore him to death with some underhanded jabber about one of the partner’s at the firm—they were old friends, allegedly—Sam was hopeful. At an event that large, the odds were just waiting to tip in his favor. Especially with all the new people sewing themselves into the crowd. He’d gone to Princeton and Duke, surely there was one mildly interesting alum in a ballroom in Maryland on a Sunday night. Someone he’d interned with or met in a sandwich shop, even.

He was on the far side of the room caught under a decorative sconce, which gave him both the benefit of added light and the view of the large set of doors that funneled people in. Just as he’d skipped and sputtered over dozens of people already, they’d had to have done the same to him. No takers, but he'd hold onto hope.

When he fished around over Pierce’s shoulder again, eyes careful not to stray too far and get caught, he saw coming in the doors something like hope.

The first he saw from their little armada was a tall brunette who, on first appearance, he reasoned couldn’t actually be who he thought she was. Because that would be too on the nose, even for a cosmic occurrence. Far enough away that he almost needed to squint, he couldn’t make the turn of her nose or the way she smiled, but he could feel in his chest the way her voice commanded the room. She was Hellenic in ivory and she was exactly who she always had been.

He didn’t know her, but once upon a time he could have. Really known her that is, not just recognition from across the way. Maybe that was why her arrival shot adrenaline through him, a reminder of the path not trodden he intended to soon embark on, or maybe it was because of who he was sure was with her.

Beside her was a man who looked as uncomfortable in his suit as Sam felt. From Sam’s vantage point he was a neat beard and a withering inflection that could have cleared the room if he wanted it to. Faintly, Sam considered what he wouldn’t give to be able to fend off the masses like him. Or just Randall J. Pierces--he was still courting the conversation along.

In the same way he could’ve known the woman, he could’ve learned from him, probably. Or maybe he would’ve been better suited to temper, play keep-away and buffer and all the other childish games. He would’ve done it gladly; still would, in fact, someone just leave the door cracked long enough for him to slip in.

Behind them both was a face that Sam didn’t need to see, not for the preciseness he remembered it with.

He was the cut of a black suit on an already restless body, a fruitless bowtie, a jagged smile that did what it needed to. God, Sam knew him, had known him, had never really stopped knowing him. It was a kind of unfortunate truth that he’d come to terms with a long time ago, turned into fortune from time to time, even.

Sam was, for a moment, the intersection of lines that were never supposed to meet. Young and desperate and unbelievably _happy_.

There was regret, too, so bitter and taking that he had to fend off Pierce’s, “Boy, are you all right?” when he blanched, but it was undeniable, the way his mouth still wanted to lurch into a grin. He’d been worried that he’d be too much for remorse to feel anything else, but that had been for naught, hadn’t it?

He wanted to know _would you excuse me?_ He wanted to take a step back, to see everything from every angle. Absurdly, he wanted to find Lisa, but that, he noted, was probably because he’d always trusted her eyes just a little more than his own.

Just as swiftly as it came, the storm surge receded and though everything in him was haphazard and drowned, he was left intact. He drew himself back to the conversation at hand— _and by that time she and I had been seeing one another for months_ —and hummed his way through it with a sort of grace. It was an art form, focusing on the conversation at hand so he didn’t have to look up and lock eyes with someone he couldn’t weather any minute of the night with.

Admittedly, the reason he tried to avoid those conversations was because he feared they’d never end. This once, just this once, he feared instead what happened when it did. He tended to stay away from the maudlin, but for once he allowed himself to believe that the night was finite and--well, there were only so many chances he could throw away. A sip of champagne sat flat on his tongue.

It’d been three years since that day outside Gage-Whitney in the pouring rain. When he’d gone back inside, he’d worked his way through three towels trying to scrub away what was left, trying to scuff his scalp raw so he would forget the feeling of being soaked to the bone and having his hair plastered across his face and not giving a single, solitary damn because he’d felt, deep in his gut, something he knew he’d never get again. Not happiness like a Californian sunset, but instead like a New York downpour. Not ice cream on his palms, but rain spatter. Not contentment, but challenge, but understanding, but what couldn’t be spun into something poetic. He’d had a crazy feeling in his chest that he’d almost run after all the way to Nashua.

It’d been something like three years, too, since he sat at the foot of what had then been his and Lisa’s bed and watched a man go from Governor to President without him, taking another one of Sam’s lives with him.

But that was then and this was—it was now, for sure. Now by the way his eyes wandered again, now by the way he finally begged, “Will you excuse me?” Now by the way he didn’t wait for an answer. He’d learned a thing or two in the last few years, at least.

Unsure of where it was he was going, it was no surprise that was when he found, or rather was found by, one of those faces he’d been waiting on.

Sam had met Keith Lancing in his second year at Duke. They’d been amicable in the way people were amicable when they saw one another’s faces more than a few times a week and had just as many academic conversations, hushed at library tables or spirited from their barstool perches. He’d been a good guy, Sam remembered, and was just the trick now. Lighting up the appropriate amount when he recognized Sam, cuffing him on the shoulder, giving a level smile and saying, “Sam freakin’ Seaborn! Long time no see, man.”

“Yeah, it has been. How are you? How’s Deb?”

Keith hadn’t married a blonde in the interim since Sam had seen him last at an event much like this. He hadn’t bought a boat either, but he had managed to acquire more kids than Sam thought should be possible for the time since they’d seen each other. It had only been a few summers, hadn’t it?

His foldout wallet went on and on, each photo a story, each story a wistful, mystic memory. A third third birthday party, a crystal anniversary in sweet clarity, a silly photo booth reel folded down to the best shot. A whole life creased and yellowed down to two and half by three point five. If he closed his eyes, Sam thought he could hear the soft jukebox music trailing from the one of twenty-one-year-old Keith and Deb, freshly married and ruddy cheeked in a college bar. She had a crewneck pulled down over her fancy auburn curls and wedding dress, a basket of wings and a beer in front of her as sauce smeared across her hands. He was down to the last couple buttons on his ill-fitting dress shirt, jacket nowhere in sight and eyes nowhere but on his wife.

“Sometimes I look at her, man. I just look at her and I think about the years,” Keith was saying, thumbing reverently at the photo booth picture: Deb mid-laugh as one of the kids—a boy with a towheaded bowl cut and bright, berry red cheeks—fish hooked his mouth into a broad grin. “And I think, ‘if I had to do it all again, there’s no one else I’d want to go through it with than her.’”

Sam felt like he’d had the wind knocked out of him.

When he was ten, he’d taken his bike out farther than he was supposed to. His parents weren’t the over-protective type, but they’d had rules, and for the most part, he’d followed them. That day was an exception, he’d felt something wild and loose inside him, pedaled all the way up to this hill too far from home and let himself fly just to see if that would stave it off.

It had for the most part, but that was because he’d gone head over handlebars and landed with an unceremonious thud, the fact that his breath was long gone from his lungs far more pressing than his half-cocked feeling. In the end he’d been scraped up, a stray pebble lodging in his elbow for his troubles, and after the scrapes and bruises healed he’d been left with wanting and a thick, pink scar that always showed itself best when his skin browned in the summer.

Now, he could feel it humming under his suit sleeve, an aching reminder. He had to fold himself back into his body with thrumming fingers, neat mountain folds and sporadic squash folds until he sat right again.

Keith smiled, unaware, and stuffed his wallet back into the pocket of his suit. They’d had a whole conversation and Sam was ashamed to say he only remembered the highlights.

“Hey, it was really good to see you again, Sam. Take care of yourself, all right?”

“You too, give Deb and the kids my best.”

“Will do,” Keith said with a nod, not saying the same of Lisa. Sam realized then that Keith had never known a Sam that was with Lisa Sherborne, their scattered run-ins over the years cutting around the timeline of that particular relationship. The thought tugged like an anchor: there were still pieces of himself out there, ones before so many afters and after so many befores. 

Sam hadn’t been miserable, he really hadn’t. He had a roof over his head, a job to go to every morning, and someone to come home to at night. He’d loved Lisa, even; had her love him in return. Not a great, heart-wrenching love from either of them, but that wasn’t the way it always went.

See, he hadn’t been weaned on regret, hadn’t had a lousy life, hadn’t spent his years melancholic and unsure because that was a waste. He made his choice and he lived with it because that was the kind of person he was. But he’d thought that what he had was enough, and that had been his fatal mistake. The moment you have to tell yourself ‘this is enough,’ you’ll always be chasing something to prove yourself wrong.

And he realized, listening to Keith Lancing who looked like the luckiest bastard in the place, that all along he’d been waiting when really he’d thought he’d been trying to make it work. Subsisting on ‘this’ll make do,’ but still reaching out for something. Had he really ever thought he’d settle into that diametric life? 

No, he thought, he hadn’t been miserable, but that didn’t mean he’d necessarily been happy, did it. And there was a certain kind of homecoming in shaking hands with your own sadness after putting it off for so long.

Overhead lights cutting through fizzing flutes of champagne, his hair falling out of place as he ducked his head against the crowd, the sharp smack of night as it swept up his throat like the patient touch of a lover.

His walk was aimless, but God if it didn’t feel good to not know where he was headed. All night, all day, all his life there had been somewhere he was supposed to be. School and work and _here_. He’d never been good at figuring out on his own where to go, but as he thumbed the slip in his pocket, he thought that would be another thing he fixed soon.

When he got to the parking lot, deep between classic cars and new models, he considered slipping into the backseat of the car. Laying with his back flat and his eyes closed, begging off with a headache when Lisa inevitably found him and gave that sad, knowing smile while he pinched the bridge of his nose, Ferris Bueller-esque to the melodramatic extreme.

But before he could find the car, he gave a distracted peek at the stars and found himself enraptured. He had no idea how long it had been since he’d looked at the sky, but God, it was marvelous. A rich, petal-blue with just the right dusting of stars around a hooked moon. Bobbers on thick water while the fisherman reeled another empty line in.

He wanted to stay out under the sky all night. Wanted to keep looking at them like it was the first time he’d ever seen them, until the chill sank in and his neck cramped up and he had to sit down. Tonight was a night for seeing old things with new sight.

“Sam?”

The North Star had other plans for him, it seemed.

He hadn’t realized that he’d kept walking, hands shoved in his pockets, face stuck in the air like a bloodhound. The brief thought that he must have looked like an idiot flashed across his mind, but it was immediately cooled by two half smiles, one for and from each of them.

“Hey.”

Josh was leaned against a Coupe de Ville that was probably as old as Sam was, a cigarette burning between his fingers. He didn’t move to pull from it, and Sam knew he wouldn’t, it was an old habit to still his enigmatic hands. He remembered sitting on the side of a bathtub while Josh scrubbed the acrid smell from his fingertips more nights than he could count, remembered when tap-water cold fingerprints would burst on his neck and along his jawline from bowing touches they wouldn’t mention come morning.

His bowtie was halfway to undone around his throat and he kept waving at it with his free hand like he wanted it to collapse entirely. “What’re you doing out here?”

Sam’s face cracked just enough under the familiarity, it was like no time had passed and yet he could feel it all as a sudden weight down the length of his spine. “Breathing the air. I swear they’ve got something different here than they do in New York.”

Josh kicked ashes from the stub in his hand to the concrete below, a nervous jerk of his thumb. “You should see what they give us in D.C.,” he joked, but it didn’t land quite right. He’d tried that one before.

“Good night so far?” Sam asked as he stepped forward, undoing his tie with one hand and shoving it into his pocket with the other.

“Well, Toby’s playing nice and CJ’s preventing national disasters in couture, but the night’s still young.” He shook his head, puffed a laugh. “You? I thought I saw Lisa, but I wasn’t sure.”

 _But I wasn’t sure until I saw you._ It hung unspoken between them for a moment, unsure if that was something they were allowed to say. 

Sam wanted to take the cigarette from between Josh’s fingers and pull off of it once, just to see if he still remembered how, before neatly tucking it back from whence it came. Instead, he said, “Lisa and I called off the engagement,” in lieu of anything else.

“You did?”

Something like hurt spiked at the back of his throat at Josh’s genuine--what, shock? It should come as no surprise to Sam, and yet he felt properly christened in it like streamers and confetti.

“Well, I talked for a while and then Lisa called off the engagement because I forgot to. That was—I guess that was almost a year ago.” He blinked, realizing for the first time that it had been that long and counting since he and Lisa had admitted that they were holding onto something that should’ve ended a long time ago. Since she told him it wasn’t his fault and he told her it wasn’t hers and they meant it.

“Almost a—then what the hell are you doing here?”

What the hell, indeed. And yet, why the hell not? The tides were turning, the coast was in sight.

“She says that it’s easier to get the answers she needs without people hounding her about where I am and I’m inclined to believe her given the dozen conversations I had to have at the last office Christmas party.” _Why don’t you bring Lisa around anymore, Sam?_ “It was all she asked, a, a united front every now and again. So I just, you know, if I'm free I lurk a bit, and no one really asks anything after that. I have to say, it's the easiest gig I've ever had. ” Ah, he was careening dangerously close to foot-in-mouth Sam by way of blurt-everything-in-one-breath Sam.

“A united front,” Josh repeated, shrugging out of his suit jacket without much thought. He tossed it on the roof of the car and added, “You’re something else, y’know that?”

Sam acquiesced with an almost smile, eyes steady on the stars. “So I’ve been told.”

If he looked to his left, he knew it would all be over, but he could still tell that Josh was giving him one of those appraisals out of the corner of his eye. Something like curiosity. Something like defeat, too, but he knew that wouldn’t last, not if he could say what it was he’d been trying to for—how long had it been? Three years and some months before that and something beyond then.

He was holding his own resolve in the palm of his hands, thumbing at it like the fragile skin and bones of a baby bird when he came to rest beside Josh, pressing his back against the window of the car and letting their shoulders meet. Josh was warm to the touch, but then, he'd always run warmer than Sam, something about Northern sensibilities.

They were silent for a while, letting the tension ebb away.

The shuffle of a suit jacket against a dress shirt, the imperceptible exhale from keen lips, the cherry on the end of the cigarette fizzling in and out like the lighthouse on a rocky shore.

“What’d you tell her?” Josh asked, finally naming his bet when he turned to face Sam head on.

“What did I tell who?” Sam hit back, calling the money on the table with some of his own. Josh’s eyes crinkled in a smile when they finally got to meet Sam’s, crow's feet cawing from their perch. Sam missed the way they felt under his thumb, warmed in sunlight, bartered out by a good day on the Hill.

“What’d you tell Lisa that—what’d you tell her?”

The ghost of a smile caught Sam’s face then. He’d been thinking about what he’d told Lisa for months, first to ask himself what the hell he’d been thinking, then to pick apart the way he’d said it. Then to wonder how he’d spent so long not saying it when it had come so easily to him, better than any of those mock speeches he used to write on the backs of bar napkins in ink pens bummed off pretty bartenders, aware only of his hands and Josh watching the words spring to life from his spot by Sam's shoulder.

He was supposed to explain all of this tomorrow, he thought dimly, bedraggled from a flight, the bitter taste of airport coffee in his mouth, fear and hope lighting his way. But this, he decided, the perfume of champagne, the whisper of smoke, surety climbing its way up his throat, this would do just fine.

“I told her I insured oil tankers and it made me question the man I was. I told her I didn’t go to New Hampshire, but I wish like hell I had every single day since. I told her—I told her I stood in the rain and missed my chance and I can’t live with it anymore.”

Josh tipped his head, humming something under his breath. He said, louder, "No, you didn't," and dropped the cigarette, mostly gone to nothing, to be snuffed under the slick line of his shoe. They were still a size too big, just like they had been all those years ago when he would slip trying to take the stairs and Sam would laugh as loud as he ever had, but would still take the opportunity to brace an arm around his back or loop theirs together just ‘til they made it to the top.

It had always been a just ‘til with them, hadn’t it? Just ‘til the sun came up, just ‘til the real work started, just ‘til the edge but never over the cliff.

Sam wanted to fly, damn the pebbles and scars.

“Sam,” he started again.

“Hm?”

“Where have you _been_?” 

Josh cleared his throat, knee-jerk embarrassed by what he’d let crawl through his teeth, but he didn't rescind it. He looked young then in a way that reminded Sam that for all the years wasted there was still so much time left for them both if they'd just stop being so stubborn.

Still, he wasn’t sure what else to say other than, “Around.” There was no good answer, no bad one either.

“No.” Josh shook his head, fingers flexing now that they didn't have anything to hold onto. “No, I mean why didn’t you—I would’ve come to get you, if you'd just have picked up the phone. You know that, I _know_ you know that, so what's the big idea here?”

And that, that had been what Sam wanted to hear just as surely as it had been the one thing he was dreading all along. Because it was good, it was great, it was so unspeakably Josh that it let Sam know that they were going to be fine if it killed them. But it was also the corroboration of the testimony Sam had been giving for three years: Josh would always come get him, but when it had mattered, when it had come down to it, Sam hadn’t gone. He’d let him down on the second-most important sure thing they had and it clawed at the back of Sam's throat like penance.

“That’s the thing,” he said, itching to do this from across the parking lot and up close and personal. He wanted to call it between tin cans and a line of string, he wanted to whisper it like a promise into the crook of his neck while hands muttered over his shoulders. “You did come get me. God, Josh, you came and got me and told me you’d found the real thing and I told you _no_. I didn’t tell you I was scared, but I was, I was out of my mind terrified because I was going to say yes, I knew I would. Damn Gage-Whitney, damn my engagement, damn my _life!_ All because you were there in front of me and I wanted to go with you more than I’d ever wanted anything else.

“But I still told you I couldn’t. So don’t—stop coming to get me. It’s my turn to come find you, all right? I’m gonna be there, I just haven’t caught up with you yet.”

Josh pushed an exhale through his teeth, looking stricken but not undone. It’d take more than that. “Are you going to?” he asked finally, finally.

“I think so, yeah.”

“You think?” he asked, trying for caustic but failing when he flipped an incredulous, hopeful smile. “What do you mean you ‘think’?”

“My flight leaves at six, but y’know, the funniest thing happened, and I can’t remember where I’m supposed to go once I get to D.C. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I might have to call around to figure it out.”

Josh shook his head, trying and failing to muster up something like mirth. “Sam, c’mon, don't be--you’re not cruel.”

His chin gave a jerky motion, aborted headshake it was every time, as as he nipped the valley fold from his pocket. “I’m not. I’ve been carrying the ticket around in my pocket for two weeks,” he explained, pushing it into Josh’s hands for inspection. He didn’t have to prove himself, but he wanted to. A showing of good faith. “It was the only way I knew it was real.”

Josh looked up from the ticket after a minute, letting it hang from his crisp fingers. No way in hell was he letting it get tugged away in the breeze, rinsed away by some mud puddle. “You’re something else, y’know that, Sam?” he said because sometimes those things bared repeating.

Sam crooked a loose grin and reached for Josh’s tie, the ridge of his thumb scraping along the skin just over his collar. He undid it the rest of the way, slipping it clear of Josh's neck. A bated moment bloomed when he bent his head enough to get a good look under Josh's chin, Josh watching quietly, if not intently, over the line of his nose as Sam wound it back around, his breath brushing over Sam's temple as he craned this way and that to make the work easier.

Tugging it once, either for good measure or old habit, Sam met his eyes one more time, hand stalled at the base of Josh’s throat. “Your people are gonna be looking for you,” he murmured, thumbing over a mostly healed cut in Josh's stubble. “You should head back in there, make sure it hasn’t come to fisticuffs in your absence.”

“CJ can take ‘em.”

“I wouldn’t bet against her, that’s for sure. But you’re gonna have a hell of a time finding someone to fill in as Press Secretary while she’s in lockup.”

“We’ll let Carol do it, she can take ‘em, too.”

He just couldn’t make it easy. “Josh—”

At his name, Josh fit his palm to the back of Sam’s wrist, dropping the practiced indifference in favor of something truthful. “I've got an early meeting, won't last more than an hour, so if we both aren't in my office at nine I’m gonna have to send my assistant to track you down. You’ll like Donna, but she won’t like you for making her go to the airport, and then we'll have to broker a peace treaty. It won't be pretty.”

Sam laughed, nodding as he pulled his hand back. “All right.”

“Yeah?”

The flash of teeth under the night sky, an anticipatory inhale, the moon cutting them a lenient shadow. The crinkle of paper in a spare palm, the careful way they joined their mouths and undid them again, the pull of a suit jacket first from the car and then back over relaxed shoulders. The bobbing of his throat, the promise in his eyes, his hands fixing his own tie back around his neck because he was the best at it of the two of them.

It was five minutes between the time when Josh stepped back into the party and Sam did, another few hours before it ended, and even more after that before Sam was able to fall asleep for the hour or so of his flight. The time between was something else, but hell, twelve hours was better than three years to figure out where he was supposed to be.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic originally spawned as a scribbled shorthand version of sam's little "it's my turn" rant tht i couldnt copy down fast enough as i thought of it. i sped-wrote the first draft in two hours from like 2-4 am? but it rlly came to life in the rewrites which i've been poring over for nearing two weeks so i'm excited to finally get this one out there
> 
> if you enjoyed this or my overly long rants in the notes i'm on tumblr @foxmulldr lmao


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